Zoothera Birding Blog
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I'm Nick Bray, the owner of Zoothera Birding, a UK-based birding holiday company. Our emphasis is on seeing all birds and wildlife well and, like most birders, we like the endemics, rare, scarce, specialty, and skulking species a lot! On our website, you may get to see different articles on birding and bird photography of common as well as unheard species of birds.
Zoothera Birding Blog
23h ago
As i've just added a few days in Kuwait to next year's Saudi Arabia tour, mainly as I think it would a really cool addition to an already successful trip, but also as this small Middle East country is apparently just at the edge of the Western Palearctic..... Well it opens up a whole new angle on reasons to go there...... The good old WP List. And as i've been largely ignorant of the interest in listing in the WP region, I have been doing a little research. It seems a bit silly now, thinking about my WP ignorance, as at one time or another i've chased birds for my Plymouth list ..read more
Zoothera Birding Blog
23h ago
So this was it, the final push. One last spot of birding on what has proved to be a top trip. So we headed down the coast from Jizan to the usual spot to tick Lesser Flamingo for the trip. There were a few Lesser's amongst about 70 Greater Flamingo's feeding at the edge of the mangroves but we were slightly more interested in finding the 'mangrove' White-eyes here and actually found a few straight away. Currently just a race of Abyssinian White-eye and i'm not sure it will ever be officially split to be honest..... But who knows? There was also a bunch of shorebirds that included Pied Avocet ..read more
Zoothera Birding Blog
1w ago
Fantastic to have a later start at 6am, but Al Saad Lake is only 25 minutes from the hotel in downtown Abu Arish, the swanky 'noisy neighbour' to Jizan. Once at the lake we decided we wanted to spend an hour scanning from the viewpoint before going in search of the tricky,elusive & nomadic Arabian Golden Sparrow. Well, it was fantastic to see 4 Wire-tailed Swallows still here, after being found last month when it was a new bird for Saudi Arabia.
Wire-tailed Swallows (phonescoped)
There were many birds here and it was all very exciting with a flock of Whiskered and Whi ..read more
Zoothera Birding Blog
1w ago
It hurt waking up so early this morning. My alarm sounded like Big Ben chiming inside my head at 03:30am and I fumbled around the apartment trying to figure out where my gear was. Clothes on, bins, scope, camera, batteries, baseball cap, car keys, sandwiches, flasks of hot water.... I did boil the kettle right? Think, i've got everything then realise i've left the milk in the fridge.....! Eventually everything came together and the 5 of us left at 4am, reaching the port at 4:50am. We weren't totally sure as to the procedure but it all worked out and we boarded eventually, after the car w ..read more
Zoothera Birding Blog
1w ago
Raidah Preserve is a very interesting site to visit.... Just for the extremely hair-raising drive down the steepest drivable tarmac road in the world and the return journey up is something else. Our journey down had a nice background of burning brakes and we had to stop half way down to let them cool off, but that happened to be at a spot for Black-crowned Tchagra, really our main target bird here as it's a potential split (possibly, maybe, who knows...?) Yet Raidah Preserve is full of birds and at 5.30am we were driving down the precipitous road, dodging Arabian Partridges along t ..read more
Zoothera Birding Blog
2w ago
Heading out at 6am we had a couple of hours to find Arabian Partridge before breakfast and departing for Abha. Our first stop drew a blank, so we returned to Wadi Dana and scanned from a different location resulting in decent scope views of Philby's Partridge - it's such a stunning bird but ' not the drone we were looking for...' (get the Star Wars analogy?). Anyway, we drove around to Wadi Al Gathal and immediately had the most co-operative and inquisitive Asir Magpie that stalked us the entire time we were here, calling repeatedly.
A true Saudi Arabian endemic - Asi ..read more
Zoothera Birding Blog
2w ago
We packed up and left the rather drab building that had pretensions of a hotel and drove for about an hour to a nice valley with a few houses dotted around. It was really like going back in time with small grassy fields and hedges and the valley was full of birdsong. We were hoping for Arabian Partridge but drew a blank on that, but we found some really great birds starting with an African Olive Pigeon perched on telegraph wires.
My phone scoped effort at an Olive (Rameron) Pigeon
A White-browed Coucal was picked up by Keith and was scoped, as were 4 Red-throated Pip ..read more
Zoothera Birding Blog
2w ago
We left at 6am and drove for 20 minutes to the narrow valley we visited yesterday (2200m). The sun was just starting to creep over the surrounding hills as we arrived and the temperature was very pleasant indeed. The valley reverberated to the sound of birdsong, with all the usual culprits adding their input to the dawn chorus. Our first good bird was Philby's Partridge on the hillside above us. And it took several hours of hard scanning before tracking down a single Arabian Grosbeak after several hours of searching and scanning the valley. This is undoubtedly the best pla ..read more
Zoothera Birding Blog
2w ago
Took the early morning flight to Al Baha, where a surprisingly quick car rental procedure saw us on the road for 50 minutes to Al Khaira Forest. In the city we spotted a group of 6 Ortolan Buntings on the rocks beside the traffic lights we were stopped at. It was a bit windy and getting quite warm by the time we arrived at a nice vegetated wadi where we scanned the Juniper clad slopes for an hour.
Everyone loves an Eurasian Hoopoe
Things were a little slow to begin, but we eventually picked up Eurasian Hoopoe, Yemen Thrush, Arabian Serin, Brown Woodland Warbler ..read more
Zoothera Birding Blog
3w ago
At 9am i'd been awake 5.5 hours!! And boy it felt like it, but the excitement of birding in the desert was exhilarating. Maybe 20+ Greater Hoopoe Larks were the highlight, some being very, very close, but several Bar-tailed Larks were also pretty cool.
Always a stunner - Greater Hoopoe-Lark
Both Blue-cheeked and European Bee-eaters were streaming north on migration making for a spectacular sight, whilst a female Western Marsh Harrier had other ideas and was heading south! We'd been searching for 5 hours for the elusive, mysterious, enigmatic, nomadic, unpredictable and ..read more